by David Carter

Greetings, sales charts fans! It’s time once again to look at Image Comics’s sales figures.

Just a reminder that I’m not doing this as a permanent gig; just filling in until Heidi finds someone to take on the indy month-to-month chart. Although that keeps looking less and less likely with each passing month, so y’all might be stuck with me for a while…

Please refer to July’s column for a preamble and explanation as to why sales standards for Image books are likely to be different than those for DC or Marvel.

Image shipped 50 comics in February, compared to 56 comics in January, 67 comics in December, 62 in November, 55 in October and 73 in September. Of those 50 comics, 10 did not place in Diamond’s Top 300, and another 19 placed below the 10K mark.

Warning: The commentary below may contain reasoned analysis, speculation (unfounded and otherwise), opinion, and/or snark. Those looking for a more straightforward analysis are directed to John Jackson Miller’s excellent Comichron analysis, posted earlier this month over at Comichron!

Please consider the fine print at the end of the column. Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com’s estimates can be found here.

(Note that the percentage comparisons are done with total orders including reorder activity, as opposed to initial orders.)

Saga slips down below the 50K mark for the first time since its second story arc. But fear not for Saga; not only are its single issue sales well above the break-even point, it makes the majority of its sales in trade paperback collections.

Rucka and Scott will be working together on the Rebirth Wonder Woman. It’s unclear what that means for Black Magick going forward. It’s possible that Scott’s every-other-issue schedule on WW is to accommodate her also continuing to work on Black Magick

Returnable, so the figures have been adjusted up 10% from what was reported by Diamond/ICv2. (For an explanation why this is done for returnable items, please see the fine print at the end of this post.)

Image titles shipping but not making the Top 300 in February include: Astronauts in Trouble, Axcend, Black Jack Ketchum, Four Eyes, From Under Mountains, Limbo, No Mercy, Pencil Head, Saints, Tithe.

Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that any of them are in danger of being cancelled; there are many reasons that the creators of these books may desire to keep them going.

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The Fine Print (Disclaimers, et cetera)

The numbers above are estimates for comic-book sales in the North American direct market, as calculated by ICv2.com according to the chart and index information provided by Diamond Comic Distributors.

ICv2.com’s estimates are somewhat lower than the actual numbers, but they are consistent from month to month, so the trends they show are fairly accurate. Since it’s a “month-to-month” column, the comments, unless otherwise noted, are on the most recent month.

Bear in mind that the figures measure sales of physical comics to retailers, not customers. Also, these numbers do not include sales to bookstores, newsstands, other mass-market retail chains or the United Kingdom. Re-orders are included, so long as they either reached stores in a book’s initial calendar month of release or were strong enough to make the chart again in a subsequent month. Keep in mind that sales for some titles may include incentives to acquire variants and not every unit sold is necessarily even intended to be sold to a customer.

If additional copies of an issue did appear on the chart after a book’s initial calendar month of release, you can see the total number of copies sold in brackets behind those issues (e.g. “[36,599]”). Should more than one issue have shipped in a month which is relevant for one of the long-term comparisons, the average between them will be used.

Titles which are returnable have their numbers artificially adjusted down by Diamond. To make up for that this column increases the reported numbers for those titles by 10%. Which is likely also wrong, but it’s a different and likely less wrong kind of wrong, and experience has shown that this leads to sales figures which are more consistent.

Please keep in mind that raw sales numbers do not tell us about how profitable a book is for a publisher or for the creators.

Above all, do not allow sales numbers to dictate your purchasing and enjoyment of a particular comic. If you enjoy reading a comic series then go right on buying and reading that comic, no matter what the sales figures say.

Opinions expressed in this column are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, Heidi MacDonald or anyone at The Comics Beat, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, or my former neighbor’s dog Miles.

The author of this column does weekly snapshots of Amazon comic sales charts at http://yetanothercomicsblog.blogspot.com/ and tweets about comics and related subjects on Twitter at @davereadscomics (PM me there is you need to contact me).